Visualization of Analytical Processes

There is currently a major discrepancy between the dramatic improvements in hardware for sensing, communication, and storage of raw data and the capacity of humans to analyze and act on this data in a meaningful way. There is every reason to believe that this development will continue in the near future, given the revolutionary changes to hardware and software in the World Wide Web, the Sensor Web, the network of hand-held and mobile devices, and the Smart Grid. We believe that improvements in the science and technology for integrating and combining analytical processing and human-computer interaction are urgently needed, so that human decision making is not overwhelmed by this flood of raw data. In this project, we will develop novel mathematical, computational, and visualization methods, such that analytical processing is partly done by the computer, partly by the human, and visualization plays a central role in the communication and collaboration between the two parties. This project is funded under the NSF Foundations of Data and Visual Analytics (FODAVA) program.